


Shackled

by osprey_archer



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Execution, Gen, Handcuffs, Red Room (Marvel), Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21751372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: The Red Room girls were not always handcuffed to their beds.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 49





	Shackled

The girls had not always been handcuffed to their beds.

Dottie still remembers this time, although she was very young when it ended. She wasn’t Dottie yet then, but Dasha, one of a hundred thousand orphans created by the civil war, so young that she didn’t even remember her full name. When they brought her to the Red Room, when they asked for her name, she could only say, “Dasha.” 

She remembers little of her life before: remembers only how the Red Room impressed her when she arrived. The smart uniforms that the girls wore, which were washed once a week. So much food that no one ever went to bed hungry. Enough beds for each girl to have her own, and even pillows, and sometimes they had pillow fights, because they were not handcuffed then.

Later, Dottie remembers those days as the happiest of her life. She still hates Lilya for running away and ruining it all. 

***

In later years, Dottie hates Lilya so much that she nearly forgets how much Dasha once loved her. Dasha was nine, and Lilya, sixteen, was her goddess. Dark-haired, bright-eyed, vivacious, rebellious but beloved: always walking right up to the cusp of trouble, but turning it aside with a remark so clever that even the teachers laughed. 

Maybe that was why Lilya thought she could get away with running away. 

Dasha didn’t know the details at the time, only that Lilya disappeared in the night. Where she went, and why, and how they caught her: Dottie still doesn’t know. 

After the incident was over, it was never mentioned again, ever. That’s always been the Red Room way. The failures are abandoned and forgotten. 

Like Dottie herself, after the failure of Leviathan. 

Not Lilya, though. They did not abandon Lilya: they brought her back. She had been gone a week, and all the girls had been in high tension. Whispering in the stairwells, glancing at each other in class. Reaching across the spaces between the beds to hold each other’s hands in the night. 

They brought Lilya directly to the firing range. Her hands were tied, her feet shackled. The chain between her ankles clanked as she shuffled across the concrete to stand between the targets. 

There were bruises on her face, but she held her head high. They’d tied a black rag so tightly over her mouth that it dragged the corners of her lips back into a ghastly smile. 

“Ready,” said their rifle instructor, as if they often marched girls out on the firing range to be shot. But they didn’t yet, not then. Lilya was the first.

And so the girls did not ready their rifles. They stood silent and pale and shivering, gazing up at their instructor wide-eyed, as if the combined weight of their frightened faces might make him rescind the order. 

“How dare you!” he burst out. “How dare you defend this traitor, this counterrevolutionary filth? She needs to be shot like the mad dog she is. How can you hesitate?” He thrust a finger at Dasha as he spoke, so she was staring down his stubby finger like the barrel of a gun. “Are you a Trotskyite?” And now the accusing finger moved on, stabbing at girl after girl. “A Zinovievite? A kulak? A wrecker?” By then the girls were all shaking, and when again he shouted, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” - this time, they followed orders. 

That night, in the dark, Anya reached across the space between their beds to hold Dasha’s hand. They were holding hands when the lights snapped on, and Matron came in with a basket of handcuffs dangling from her arm. “You’ll lock yourselves in every night,” she said. Her mouth twitched as she spoke, as if she didn’t want to say it. “No more runaways, they said.”

“But Matron.” This was Ksenia. When the death matches started, not too long after, she was one of the first to have her neck broken. “What if there’s a fire?”

Matron snapped the handcuff closed around Dasha’s wrist. The metal was cold against her skin. “Then I guess you’ll all burn up.”


End file.
